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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection Antoni Tàpies with Lawrence Alloway

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection Antoni Tàpies with Lawrence Alloway Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Antoni Tàpies with Lawrence Alloway THOMAS M. MESSER Ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me? Let me welcome you and congratulate you to your courage to brave the weather and to come in on a cold day like this. I shall take a minute for a few announcements which have to do with the resumption of our staff lecture program during weekdays. Beginning with February 15th, we shall have a regular Thursday and Friday lecture at 4:00 in the afternoon given by members of the staff. Mr. Daniel Robbins, our assistant curator, and Dr. Louise Svendsen, our curator of education, will hold alternate lectures [01:00] on Thursday. And a new member of our staff, Mr. Maurice Tuchman, will be Friday lecturer. This afternoon staff lecture program, which is oriented toward the public in general, and which deals with broader subjects not necessarily connected with the exhibition program, will be reinforced by our vice president, Mr. Anderson, who will also join this group. The Sunday lectures, of course, will continue. But we shall take a brief break between the lecture today and the next one, skip from the usual two weeks to a four-weeks pause, and resume again on March 11th when I’ll have the privilege of starting a lecture sequence which will [02:00] address itself to problems of cubism and in particular to Fernand Leger, whose exhibition is scheduled to start at the museum on February 28th. My lecture on Sunday, March 11th, will be followed in two-weeks intervals by lectures given on the same subject, on Leger and cubism. And the speakers on Sunday afternoons will be Henry Hope, Chairman of the Fine Arts Department at the Indiana University; Dr. Robert Goldwater, Director of the Museum of Primitive Art; and Professor Robert Rosenbloom, Assistant Professor at the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. The final two Sunday lectures will have to do with the Phil Guston exhibition which will start later in the season. [03:00] And it is Mr. Anderson and Sam Hunter, the Director of the Poses Institute of Fine Arts and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, who will finish the lecture series on Sundays. As you know, ladies and gentlemen, the Sunday series usually is directly related to the exhibition program and will be so today, although the exhibition to which the lecture is related is not yet in evidence. I have mentioned the Leger opening on February 28th, which will be followed by an exhibition opening scheduled for March 22nd, an exhibition devoted to the work of Antonio Tapies, the Spanish painter. The lecture today is on the subject and is given [04:00] by a very distinguished English critic, by our friend Lawrence Alloway. Mr. Alloway, who is known to audiences in New York for his primary interest in twentieth-century art, known as an interpreter of avant garde movements and organizer of important exhibitions, has been deputy director, and later program director, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He has lectured extensively at the National Gallery and at the Tate Gallery in London and is currently writing on American abstract painting and completing a monograph on the Danish painter Asger Jorn. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 9 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Antoni Tàpies with Lawrence Alloway Mr. Alloway is teaching at Bennington College in Vermont [05:00] and will remain in this capacity until the end of June of this year. The day after, as you may know, he will join the staff of the Guggenheim Museum. And it is therefore my great pleasure, my double pleasure, to present to you the speaker this afternoon and introduce him as the lecturer on the theme of Tapies while at the same time using this opportunity to extend to him a public welcome as a member of my staff. Lawrence Alloway. LAWRENCE ALLOWAY [06:00] Twentieth-century abstract art is international. It’s more global than the Gothic style was. And it’s more global than the Baroque style was. But there are, scattered round the world, within the international context of international abstract art, there are counter movements which is that roots and national sovereignty. In England for instance -- and this I know something about -- in England there’s a strong attempt to prove there is a connection between abstract art and the English tradition of landscape painting so that abstract painting is always being likened to the weather and the sunset and the sea in England. And this is supposed to be a specially British thing. Another way in which grassroots [07:00] and sovereignty is brought in, or is attempted to be brought in, to the international style, for example, connects with America. There have been efforts made inside and outside the States to suggest that because America is a big country, then it’s natural that such big pictures get painted here -- you know, the image of the prairies, the image of Niagara and all that. This is supposed to have something to do with the big painting size. But the extreme case of an attempt to impose some kind of national image on international painting, international post-war painting, is the case of Spain because here the romantic image of Spain, which was set up in the nineteenth century, still dominates almost everybody who writes about Spanish art. American, English, French critics, as well as the Spaniards themselves, all accept a kind of romantic national local [08:00] image as being the content of Spanish painting. Now, this package as national image on the whole, I think, is cliché. And some of the elements that go to make it up are these. There’s Spain itself. Well now it’s barren. It’s dry. It’s rocky. It’s brown, you know? And you can find the dryness and brownness and so forth in a good deal of Spanish painting. And therefore there’s supposed to be some connection between the geography of the place and the physionomy of the paintings that have been done in Spain in the last ten years or so. Then there’s the national temperament. It’s austere, you know? Like, in the sixteenth-century Spanish court fashion was black when everybody else on the earth was wearing colors. So, there’s an austerity which has a sort of convincing sixteenth-century root. But the austerity is always being checked by violence. And that’s all that bullfight stuff, you know? [09:00] So there’s austerity. There’s violence. Again, the national temperament, very Spanish. There’s also the historical isolation of the Spaniards, of the Spanish painters. El Greco is pretty solitary in the sixteenth century. Velazquez doesn’t have much company in the seventeenth. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 9 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Antoni Tàpies with Lawrence Alloway Goya is on his own in the nineteenth and so on, Picasso in the twentieth century. There hasn’t been, in Spain, an unbroken continuous spectacle, parade of painters. In Spain, all the artists have been islands. And therefore, the isolation of the artist, the austerity and the violence, supposed to be a national temperament, and the dry, bare, brown place, all these things have been said to show in Spanish painting. It has, I think, however, a pretty misleading effect. It has the effect of making all of the Spanish artists, the newer Spanish artists, look equal. If, after all, there’s sort of a -- really it’s a Spanish temperament [10:00] working through them, how do you tell them apart? It doesn’t matter as long. As these national qualities are exemplified, their art shows it, and that’s it. It’s not a good basis to make esthetic judgments on. It also has the disadvantage of sealing Spanish art off from that part of European painting, international European painting, at the moment it connects with. So, what I want to do this afternoon is talk about Tapies in isolation from other Spanish painters. I think he’s better than the other Spanish painters. And also, I want to talk about him in relation to an aspect of international European art because I think that the Spanish-ness which is being projected on him is basically a nineteenth-century romantic game which is unverifiable and pretty unilluminating. Tapies was born in Barcelona in 1923. And he is a self-taught, full-time painter [11:00] since 1946. His early work, which I want to indicate incompletely on the screen, is pretty typical of later Surrealism. Images like this -- Dream Garden, it’s called, of 1949 -- stylistically this is related to a good deal that was going on outside Spain at that time in the late ’40s. There’s this immersional illusionist space with cosmic overtones. And the space, the illusionist, immersional space, is filled with solid, often automatically painted forms. You can find this kind of art being done in New York by Matta, by Enrico Donati, By Esteban Frances. This is very much the cosmic, dramatic, immersional, spatial game of late Surrealism, when the Surrealists were [12:00] exploring a space which they hoped was interplanetary and galactic. That’s a detail of Dream Garden. Another painting of this phase is 1951. This one’s called Still Life of a Hunt. And again, there’s the evocation of rather deep, illusionist space of a kind that Tapies was shortly to give up, an illusionist Surrealist space combined with increasing solidity and firmness in areas of the paint.
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